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Monday, October 31, 2011

This coming Thursday is the first International Stout Day - a celebration of that most noble of beer styles, which if I remember rightly is the most common beer style that I brew. A quick check of my brewing record confirms that, indeed it is the various iterations of stout which are among the few beers that I have brewed more than once.

My favourite winter homebrew is Machair Mor, a Foreign Extra Stout with a very healthy dose of chocolate malt. The full recipe is as follows, for an original gravity of 1.058 and 37 IBUs:

71% Golden Promise Pale Malt

11% Turbinado Sugar

7% Caramel 80

7% Chocolate Malt

4% Roasted Barley

17 IBU of Goldings for 90 minutes

14 IBU of Goldings for 30 minutes

6 IBU of Goldings for 15 minutes

Danstar Nottingham Yeast

I have made this beer every autumn since moving to the US, although the 2009 version was a bit stronger, and bittered with Galena rather than being a single hopped version like last year and this. So far every version of this beer has been very well received, which is just as well as Mrs Velkyal's uncle includes it in his Christmas hamper for his clients.

I brewed the latest batch of this sweet, smooth delight on Saturday, just as the temperatures crashed here in Charlottesville and I had to bring it back into the warm a bit to rouse the yeast into life. For the first time, I will be entering it into a competition, the Palmetto State Brewers Open in Columbia, SC at the beginning of December. Hopefully it will end up looking and tasting similar to the original version....